Quotes About Observation

Being a historian, if only for the day, teaches you useful things like judgment, and the ability to detect when someone is lying to you.

When we human beings hypothesize that a law of nature holds - even temporarily or situationally - we are creating an idea, but we are also making a hypothesis about how nature behaves, whose truth or usefulness has nothing to do with what we know or believe.

You just have to look at me to know what I am feeling. So I would be a useless policewoman or spy.

OkCupid has users from 18 to 80 on the site. And we get to observe all of their actions. We get to watch how they use the site, how they interact with other people.

You have to know what your users are experiencing.

We're looking at Earth science, observing our planet. Also space science, looking at the ozone in the atmosphere around our Earth. Also looking at life science. And on a human level, using ourselves as test subjects.

I believe in living with the camera, and not using the camera.

I found it possible to observe at least the superficial capillaries of muscles both in the frog and in mammals through a binocular microscope, using strong reflected light as a source of illumination. Resting muscles observed in this way are usually quite pale, and the microscope reveals only a few capillaries at fairly regular intervals.

I don't believe in reading. I don't care about reading. It means nothing to me. I believe that by using your eyes and ears, you'll find everything that there is, and you don't have to read about it.

When you start using senses you've neglected, your reward is to see the world with completely fresh eyes.

Everyone says how Calvin and Hobbes is about a real kid, to me there's nothing real about it; it's an adult using a kid's body as a mouthpiece.

It is always good to know which ideas cannot be checked directly, but it is not necessary to remove them all. It is not true that we can pursue science completely by using only those concepts which are directly subject to experiment.

I've been naturally quick at learning things, and I learn by doing things, so if I sit beside someone who is actively doing something, I look at how they do it and absorb the way in which they do something and find my own comfortable way of reimagining that, or using certain techniques in my own way.

Astronomers are using every technique at their disposal to discover and study asteroids.

I always wanted to know what lens they were on, how close they were. I didn't do it with a plan in mind, but I would instinctively gear what I was doing toward what lenses they were using.

I had the usual friends who pointed out constellations of stars. But it really was watching the stars. It was getting some sense of the motion of the earth. I found it a remarkable thing.

In fiction you're not often writing about the typical; you are interested in outliers, the points of interest. Part of it comes from feeling I was the only Asian or person of colour... another part comes from my personality: I'm an introvert, and my usual survival mode in a large group is to stand by a wall and watch everybody.

I see my writing as the process of looking at the usual, but from two steps to the side.

'Two' is not written in the usual style of a novel. It's a straightforward, linear narrative of my times, as I observed partition, and is told through multiple characters.

Fascism, the more it considers and observes the future and the development of humanity, quite apart from political considerations of the moment, believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace.

So when I write characters and situations and relationships, I try to sort of utilize what I know about the world, limited as it is, and what I hear from my friends and see with my relatives.

I make notes about things I see in films that really affect me, like the ending of 'Jules and Jim.' I think about how I can utilize things in my work. And I have a team of people who keep me down to earth.

We explore our environment, more than we are compelled to utter poetry, when we're toddlers. We start doing that later. Before that happens, every child is a scientist.

Babies are endlessly fascinating to look at and I'm obsessed about their complete and utter lack of guile.